unlimited data plan

Have you ever received that AT&T bill in the mail only to see a huge balance thanks to an extremely large overage of text messages, or your daughters new Android phone went way over her 2GB data limit? I'm sure we've all been here before, especially back in the early days when we had 300 text message plans. Well today things are about to change and carriers will no longer be able to secretly sit back while users incur huge overage fees.

While Virgin Mobile is technically unlimited (and aren't they proud of it) their parent company had intended to begin throttling its data-hungry users some time in October. Today the company issued a statement saying that while they still intend to slow down the connection of their most active customers, the change won't happen until an unspecified date in 2012.The information was released as Virgin Mobile confirmed that it's offering the LG Optimus Slider and HTC Wildfire.

If you are one of the many users over on T-Mobile that have been wondering what will happen during and after this AT&T-Mobile merger goes though (if it does), AT&T and T-Mobile have outlined a few more details to put users at ease. AT&T is now saying users will be able to keep their current rate and plan after the merger goes through, even after your contract expires from T-Mobile. This is great news for many of the long time T-Mo customers with amazing grandfathered-in plans like myself.

I don't know about you reader but I personally like the T-Mobile Carly commercials as of late. A nice replacement for Catherine Zeta Jones if you ask me. Over at Virgin Mobile they feel differently about those commercials and that magenta colored dress and have a few of their own ad campaigns to prove it. Recently we've seen a few attacks come out of Virgin Mobile aimed directly at T-Mobile and their pricing.

AT&T has said that starting as soon as August 11th, it will start moving those customers whom they've contacted about tethering without a specific tethering plan on to one. Those customers in question will be moved onto AT&T's Data Pro plus Tehthering, giving them 4 GB of data to use for $45 a month.

It has begun! AT&T has officially reported that starting on October 1st, 2011, the top 5% of AT&T will start to see reduced speeds. Top users, in this case, meaning those who use inordinate amounts of data on a daily basis, downloading Star Wars all day long and listening to the Imperial March on Spotify. What AT&T plans to do about you wild and crazy data machines is to force choke you - and by force choke I of course mean throttle your data speeds, making you have slower uploads and slower downloads once you get to a certain point during the month when AT&T thinks you've simply had enough. AT&T made it clear today that it's not you average Americans that they're slipping their fingers around, it's the evil rebels using "12 times more data than the average of all other smartphone data customers."

Virgin Mobile is changing their Beyond Talk Plans as of late. One way to nudge subscribers into higher priced plans is to slightly raise the price of your main plans, but then lower the cost of the unlimited everything option. That is exactly what Virgin Mobile has just done, although some might not be happy that unlimited everything plan for only $55 sounds like a pretty great deal.

You better hurry and get moving if you want to get in with a Verizon Wireless unlimited data plan, or even just something better than the tiered plans coming soon. We have just got confirmation of the tiered data fees that Verizon plans to start come July 7th and will replace the existing options. New details are confirming four main options for subscribers.

We have seen a few reports like this before basically saying that Android and its users are hungry for data and just so happen to use the most. This specific report mentions U.S. smartphone data usage based on Operating System and in this case Android is the clear leader as usual. Not only has mobile data jumped around 89% over the past year but Android and iOS continues to climb and climb.

It looks like today we have some good news coming out of Team Magenta, the guys from T-Mobile are updating the prepaid plans they currently have. We first mentioned these back in April and T-Mobile took some heat from just about every blog and across twitter over the data caps they had included. If you went over 2GB of data usage (like facebook and emails) your speeds get throttled. Basically it wasn't "umlimited" and after a certain amount they shut you down.